• By Lisa Nuss | Special to The Examiner |
• Sep 15, 2022 Updated 22 hrs ago

Please see this Op/Ed I published in the San Francisco Examiner this week. While I figure out how to reprint the piece, please follow link below:

https://www.sfexaminer.com/our_sections/forum/both-san-francisco-public-and-private-high-schools-are-engaged-in-a-fiction-about-educational/article_d8d969b6-351d-11ed-ad78-3bbb0586ef58.html

What if we reformed the ACTUAL causes of the Achievement Gap?

There wasn’t room in the OpEd to add that we’ve failed to address the actual causes of the achievement gap. A popular trend in corporate consulting coaches people to reframe challenging problems. If your efforts to change an outcome consistently fail, then maybe you’re not solving the right problem. In this case posed in my OpEd, the “problem” has been that mostly white and/or wealthy kids are tracked into achievement math, while mostly non-wealthy and/or non-white kids are tracked into remedial math. The “solution” that the California and San Francisco public school administrative brain trust invented was to eliminate different math levels. I’m not aware of any measurable improvement to the achievement gap since 2014 when this stupendous plan was put into place. I believe the achievement gap today is worse than it was in 2014, and that’s because we didn’t reform the actual problem.

First, I suggest reframing the “Achievement Gap” by calling it a “failure to teach.” “Achievement gap” seems to put the onus on the kids who don’t achieve; whereas “failure to teach” puts the onus on schools that don’t educate. When we shift our minds this way, it allows us to wonder: What if the failure is inherent in the school system and not in the non-wealthy, non-white children (or their families)?

We have data showing low student performance by race and class in the U.S. are directly connected to the following factors:

poor teacher quality

arrogance of middle class educators and volunteers

teacher/administrator bias

lack of resources

Any new “equity” program that doesn’t reform those problems can’t succeed. But here we find the conflict of interest. The players involved in factors one through three above are the ones who get to frame the problem. But here, you, the reader, and I get to frame. As my law school Contracts Professor would say, “Reason with me….”

Have we correctly identified the problem?

Here’s an example of the achievement gap. Last year at my son’s public middle school in Marin County, California, (Bayside MLK) more than half the kids were failing math class. The teacher ranted daily about this problem to the class, scolding the children for failing to learn. Bayside has a mix of mostly wealthy white students from Sausalito, mostly non-wealthy, non-white kids from Marin City, and a spattering of others. A majority of the students failing were non-white. This is more than a gap — it’s a monstrous chasm of failure.

For decades, the middle class mostly white people who run schools look at these kinds of outcomes and speculate about how non-white families are not supporting their children, are too over-worked or the kids are too undernourished to learn properly. Recently a San Francisco School Board member offered that a certain swath of non-white children weren’t doing well because their parents were lazy.

But let’s take another look at the “problem” by adding in some facts. Most of the wealthy white students who passed had private tutors. Most of the students who failed did not have private tutors. One might reframe the problem this way: If the only students who did well in math had private tutors, the problem looks like the school is failing to teach. Instead of going down another rabbit hole of speculating about what’s “wrong” with the failing kids’ families, let’s take a look at what’s wrong with administrators who are paid over $200,000K and send more than half their 8th graders into high school having failed to teach them math? That’s a discussion I would love others to join me in. Thanks to some of my work, one of those $200,000K administrators will shortly be leaving the area – but others lurk above him that are paid more.

John Taylor Gatto, the three-time New York State Teacher of the Year who quit public teaching said he did it in large part due to the administrators who rise through today’s public schools system. Thirty years ago he predicted the “disaster of ignorance” plaguing our public schools:

It took me years of research, combined with my own parenting and years of homeschooling my son, to finally “get” that children are natural learners. If students aren’t learning, the adults in the room have gotten in their way or done something wrong.

I’ve watched the California public schools fail to teach math due to poor teacher/administrator quality — I’ll provide details in a later post, with citations from experts noting that no reform can succeed without improving teacher quality.

The arrogance in “solving” the achievement gap to me is revealed in the fact that it’s called an achievement gap. Many of the suburban middle class and mostly white public school teachers/administrators at my son’s schools have always had a whiff of condescension against kids and families who are non-wealthy and/or non-white. Not all of them to be sure. But enough. And this also goes for the wealthy white mom volunteers as well.

I got my first whiff of this when my son was in First Grade. His First Grade was the first year of Common Core… fun times. One of the mom groups at the school decided they would fix the reading problems some lower income children had by giving them books to keep in their homes. Because data had shown a connection between books in the home and literacy, it was presumed that the existence of the one directly lead to the other.

My son’s best friend was from a family we’d say was from the “wrong side of the tracks.” Lots of kids, wearing mis-matched clothes, both parents dropped out of high school. They had a lot of interests, and the kids were smart, curious, energetic and resourceful — but they were not a family of readers. Anyway, their house was a disaster — which is not a judgment because mine is often as well — it’s just a fact. The kids lost school library books they checked out, so they lost their borrowing privileges. The school thought if they gave them their own (used) books to keep – that would solve the problem. Despite their best efforts, turns out books got lost in that house, library or not. They were not a family of readers and school was not going to make them into a family of readers.

Readers informed about literacy challenges can probably guess what the real problem was. The surface problem was several of the kids weren’t doing well on tests — but the cause was not lack of books in the home. The cause in one case was dyslexia, in another was an undiagnosed learning disorder and in another was anxiety.

Thinking that those problems will be solved with a home library is almost laughable – especially when the very highly paid principal was a special education expert. This was 2014 and the school had no idea how to handle dyslexia. With 30 kids in one class, and a new Common Core curriculum driving the teachers crazy, their only “solution” for kids with trouble reading was to have them stay after school for more reading.

A fellow parent whose a college math professor heard me tell this story and he said, “Great solution! Let’s do MORE of what’s not working.” He eventually homeschooled his kids in the same program as mine.

The other child with an undiagnosed learning disorder was just sort of passed through as was the one with anxiety. Classrooms full of 30 kids don’t allow even the best trained teachers to give children the attention they need. So lack of resources is a huge part of it, but there was a punitive attitude to the kids who couldn’t keep up.

Learning challenges can be hereditary, which in this case partly explains the parents having dropped out of high school, which partly explains their financial challenges. The pattern leads middle class educators to treat them like they’re not smart, or lazy. The family didn’t need to be “fixed” — the school system needed to be fixed, with funding to have small class sizes, and quality curriculum to address learning challenges, and quality teachers to guide students in their learning.

Now in Marin there’s a volunteer group trying to close the achievement gap. This group’s existence is pointed to often as some kind of sign that progress is being made, and yet the gap in Marin persists as it does around the state. I see reports of lots of things the group says they have accomplished. But more than half the kids in an 8th grade class in the only town in Marin with a significant Black population failed math, so I don’t think the volunteer group has cracked the code.

To be continued…